Hello and welcome to the February 2025 edition of the Documench Newsletter!
For better and worse, it has been another intense month for the American Jewish communities we document and discuss here at the Berman Archive. Kanye West took to the Superbowl to sell t-shirts with swastikas while AI-generated Jewish celebs responded in kind (and without consent). HIAS sued the government for its new anti-refugee policies (see this 1915 article from our archive for a sense of the American Jewish relationship to refugees over 100 years ago). And Jewish interests can now be bought on the stock market under the ticker TOV. Spoiler alert: TOV’s holdings look a lot like the S&P 500’s top holdings.
The general tumultuousness is being felt within the Jewish community, too, so this month we are taking a long look at Jewish organizations. There have been a number of Jewish organizations that have closed or merged in recent months, so we wanted to better understand their lifecycles: how they launch, why they merge or shutter, and what they tell us along the way. To get some perspective on this question, we spoke with Aliza Mazor of UpStart to reflect on her 30+ years supporting the sector. We also have a roundup of recent research published by Jewish organizations about the American Jewish community (one was a project I worked on).
Thanks for reading,
-Ari
Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive
The Sunrise & Sunset of Jewish Organizations
Over the past few months, a number of notable and impactful Jewish organizations have merged or shut down. Gender Equity in Hiring is closing down operations. Jumpstart shuttered after 17 years (we will be the repository for its reports). Leading Edge merged with JPro. Sometimes these shifts are geographic, like Hebrew Union College’s imminent move to the Upper West Side of NYC.
These organizational shifts got us thinking about the life cycle of Jewish organizations. What’s lost when they shutter or change? We interviewed Aliza Mazor, Chief Philanthropic Engagement Officer at UpStart, for insights from her decades launching organizations and supporting Jewish communities.
Berman Archive: Please tell us about your work and its connection to the American Jewish community.
Aliza Mazor: I have spent the past 30 + years of my career helping to support entrepreneurs and innovators in both Israel and the United States. In my early career at Shatil and the New Israel Fund, my work focused on building civil society in Israel and strengthening Israeli Society. Since 2000, my work has focused on building just, vibrant, and inclusive Jewish communities in North America. Over the decades I have worked at the intersection of leadership development, organizational development, network weaving, and field-building. The most recent chapter of my career has been at UpStart, the product of a 2017 merger of Bikkurim (where I served as Executive Director and Program Director), Joshua Venture (where I served in various roles), PresenTense North America, and UpStart Bay Area. The merger tells a great story of the evolution of a field and how needs shift over time and forms have to adapt to follow function.
BA: We’re interested in the life cycle of Jewish organizations and how efforts are preserved. Are there any examples of organizations you’ve supported that had an impact but don’t exist anymore?
AM: Many organizations came about at a particular moment to serve an important purpose and then needed to reconfigure to continue to advance that purpose. The merger that created UpStart in 2017 is one example. We needed a multiplicity of organizations working to advance innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when those ideas were met with skepticism and resistance. After a decade of “proof of concept” it was clear that we were not only launching important initiatives across the community, but we were also changing mindsets and landscapes. After a decade-plus of this work, it was clear that having lots of disparate organizations doing this work made less sense. It was distracting and confusing. We needed to consolidate to continue to grow the field. The merger that brought four organizations together as UpStart in 2017, did just that. We were able to create a pipeline of programs (using the best elements of the programs from Joshua Venture, Bikkurim, PresenTense, and UpStart Bay Area) to serve entrepreneurs at the idea, early, and growth stages. We were able to consolidate all the graduates of these historical programs into a powerful network with over 200 members. None of this would have been possible without consolidation and letting go of old forms.
Research Roundup
In our ongoing effort to keep on top of the newest insights about American Jewry, we’re offering a semi-regular digest of new research. Our role here is not to weigh in on which studies we find credible and which we wished were stronger. We find all of these documents insightful both for what they reveal and what they say implicitly about the concerns of American Jewish organizations and American Jews more generally. Like the lifecycle of organizations and efforts, research efforts, too, ebb and flow with the times.
[In the coming months, we’ll be adding these reports to our archive.]
Jewish Majority released a poll showing that American Jews largely reject anti-zionist sentiment.
The American Jewish Committee released its annual State of Antisemitism in America Report. Jewish and general population respondents see a rise in antisemitism and identify anti-Israel sentiment as antisemitic.
The Anti Defamation League released a report, Campus Antisemitism One Year After the Hamas Terrorist Attacks. This survey connects “antisemitic and hostile anti-Israel attitudes” with “student minimization of campus antisemitism.” The study also finds that the rise in campus antisemitism has led to increasing self-censorship of views by Jewish students.
Stanford and the Jewish Federation of North America released findings from a groundbreaking study of American Jewish teens entitled, Strength, Stress, and Support: A National Study of American Jewish Teen Well-Being. The study found that a teen’s Jewish identity heightens both their sense of well being and their awareness of—and stress about —the tensions of our times. (Full disclosure, Berman Archive Director Ari Y Kelman was a researcher on this project.)
